Arap Moi – Higher education champion who suppressed dissent
Kenya’s second president, Daniel Toroitich arap Moi (1924-2020), who died on 4 February in Nairobi, oversaw a kleptocracy that looted the economy for 24 years and persecuted a generation of dissenting academics and students. But he also introduced free primary education, built many secondary schools for girls and presided over an increase in the number of fully-fledged public universities in Kenya from one to six.
13 Şubat 2020 - 17:18
At the time Moi succeeded Jomo Kenyatta in 1978, the University of Nairobi was the only fully-fledged university in the country, with its two constituent colleges Kenyatta University College and Egerton College, and with a total enrolment of 7,000 students.
By then there was a clamour for a second university. As a former primary school headmaster before he was handpicked by the colonial administration to enter Kenya’s colonial Legislative Council in 1955, Moi saw an opportunity to shore up his populist political fortunes by establishing a second university.
In 1981, Moi approved the appointment of Dr Colin B Mackay, a Canadian legal scholar, as the chairman of a presidential working party mandated to investigate the feasibility of establishing a second university with special emphasis on technical and science degrees. Mackay’s committee said it found overwhelming support for the move, which saw the opening in 1984 of Moi University in Eldoret, a town in the Rift Valley region, about 265 kilometres from Nairobi.
Expansion of universities
Soon after, Kenyatta University College and Egerton University College were elevated to full university status in 1985 and 1987 respectively, raising the number of public universities to four. By the time Moi exited Kenya’s political stage in 2002, he had raised the number of public universities to six with the establishment of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (1994) and Maseno University (2001), with a total enrolment of 62,875 students.
Whereas Moi’s legacy of university education expansion is secured, history will censure him for enforcing arrest, imprisonment, harassment and detention without trial to suppress and silence his critics, many of whom were university lecturers and students. On assuming power in 1978, Moi promised to follow in the footsteps of Kenyatta, whom he described as his teacher and mentor.
Thus, Moi resumed the detentions without trial that Kenyatta had perfected under the Preservation of Public Security Act, a law inherited from the British colonial legal system. In 1982, a crackdown was undertaken at the University of Nairobi, that was considered a political hot-bed for lecturers who taught Marxist-Leninist political ideas.
According to the study, We Lived To Tell: The Nyayo House Story, conducted by German academic charity Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, after banning the Universities’ Academic Staff Association, Moi detained its leadership and other lecturers who included Willy Mutunga, Kamonji Wachira, Al Amin Mazrui, Edward Oyugi, Maina wa Kinyatti, Mukaru Ng’ang’a and Katama Mkangi.
Enemies in academia
Moi made it clear in the early days of his rule that dissent and independent political opinion and views would not be tolerated in a country he considered to be his own backyard. For Moi, an opportunity to stamp his authority presented itself on 2 August 1982, when a group of soldiers of the Kenya Air Force tried to overthrow his government.
Immediately after the suppression of the coup attempt, Moi had an excuse to deal with his real or perceived enemies in academia with a ruthlessness and boldness not yet witnessed in many other countries across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Wafula Buke, a former student leader at the Nairobi University, remembers how Kamiti maximum security prison and Nairobi remand prison were turned into concentration camps where university students, accused of supporting the rebel soldiers, were held.
“Among them was Titus Adungosi, the chairman of the student organisation of Nairobi University”, said Buke. Adungosi, who was just 22, was taken to court and found guilty for demonstrating and addressing other students in support of air force rebels. He was jailed for 10 years but mysteriously died in prison in 1988.
Between 1982 and the advent of calls for multi-party politics in 1990, Moi had vacuumed up dissent from Kenya’s academia. Among some of the prominent academics who fled Moi’s vacuum cleaner were Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Micere Mugo, Kimani Gecau, Anyang Nyong’o, Shadrack Gutto, Ngugi wa Mirii and Elisha Atieno Odhiambo. In effect, departments of literature, government, sociology and history at the University of Nairobi lost some of their finest scholars and have not recovered since.
A lover of higher education – in public
In public Moi, however, was a leader who loved higher education. Occasionally he would drive with his security detail unannounced to the student halls of residence and have tea with students. He would be televised telling the students to read, but to avoid foreign ideologies that had no meaning or value in African culture.
What Moi appeared to like most was the annual university graduation ceremonies when he would appear to confer degrees and diplomas to students. He would be dressed in feathered headgear and a multi-coloured academic gown reminiscent of the coloured military uniforms worn by Mobutu Sese Seko, the late president of the former Zaire.
As Moi presided over those occasions, he was not only recognised by his appointed vice-chancellors as “his excellency, the president of the Republic of Kenya”, but also as “the chancellor of all the public universities and teacher number one”.
No doubt this was one of the highs in the life of a man who never had a secondary-level education and, had fate not smiled on him, might have taught and retired as a headmaster in Sacho village where he was born and where he once grazed goats in the nearby Tugen Hills. While six public universities awarded him honorary doctoral degrees in law, literature and humanities, Moi never used those titles.
In his book, The Making of an African Statesman, Moi’s biographer Andrew Morton described him as a man in hurry as he impelled the contractor to finish construction of Moi University, his pet project. What Morton did not tell his readers was that Moi was impatient to have a major vocationally-oriented university in the country that would serve as a checkmate to the University of Nairobi that he believed was a hot-bed of dangerous, foreign political ideologies.
Like others among Africa’s ‘big men’, Moi supported the emergence of developmental universities, with curricula organised around learning that could produce ready-to-work graduates but had nothing to do with politics.
According to Professor Henry Mwanzi, a historian at Kenyatta University and one of Moi’s few handymen intellectuals, the president was a pragmatic realist and a master of practical politics.
“President Moi was not consumed by ideological strife and did not pursue theories for their own sake,” Mwanzi said of Moi in a reader, Which Way Africa?, edited by Lee Njiru, Moi’s press secretary for over 40 years.
In his memoir Trails in Academic and Administrative Leadership in Kenya, Professor Ratemo Michieka, the first vice-chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (1994-2013), tells how he was unexpectedly summoned to State House in Nakuru, about 165 kilometres from Nairobi, to meet the president to justify why Jomo Kenyatta University College of Agriculture and Technology, of which he was the principal, had made a request for university status.
“On arrival I was bluntly asked to explain why we wanted to disassociate from Kenyatta University,” said Michieka.
Michieka and his team had expected to find Moi in the company of the education minister, director of education, vice-chancellor of Kenyatta University (of which Jomo Kenyatta was a constituent college), and other higher education experts. But according to Michieka, the president was flanked by local politicians, some of them councillors.
“I and my team that included members of the Moi ethnic community slowly explained the developments we had achieved and [that we] now needed to be consolidated in an autonomous university,” wrote Michieka.
Behind a mask
In the week following that meeting, Michieka said he was surprised to hear in a news bulletin from the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, the official government mouthpiece, that his college had become a fully-fledged university. As Morton explained, in politics Moi remained behind a mask, as in most instances he expected others to show their hand before he revealed his cards.
However, in dealing with academia, the opposite was true. Moi was consistently hostile to scholars who dared to call for academic freedom, or supported multi-party democracy.
On 12 February, the man known as ‘professor of politics’ by many Kenyans will be interred at his home in Nakuru near the private, Christian-based Kabarak University where Arap Moi was also chancellor. There will be a huge headstone for a primary school headmaster who rose to become a president and left an indelible mark on Kenya’s university system.
By then there was a clamour for a second university. As a former primary school headmaster before he was handpicked by the colonial administration to enter Kenya’s colonial Legislative Council in 1955, Moi saw an opportunity to shore up his populist political fortunes by establishing a second university.
In 1981, Moi approved the appointment of Dr Colin B Mackay, a Canadian legal scholar, as the chairman of a presidential working party mandated to investigate the feasibility of establishing a second university with special emphasis on technical and science degrees. Mackay’s committee said it found overwhelming support for the move, which saw the opening in 1984 of Moi University in Eldoret, a town in the Rift Valley region, about 265 kilometres from Nairobi.
Expansion of universities
Soon after, Kenyatta University College and Egerton University College were elevated to full university status in 1985 and 1987 respectively, raising the number of public universities to four. By the time Moi exited Kenya’s political stage in 2002, he had raised the number of public universities to six with the establishment of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (1994) and Maseno University (2001), with a total enrolment of 62,875 students.
Whereas Moi’s legacy of university education expansion is secured, history will censure him for enforcing arrest, imprisonment, harassment and detention without trial to suppress and silence his critics, many of whom were university lecturers and students. On assuming power in 1978, Moi promised to follow in the footsteps of Kenyatta, whom he described as his teacher and mentor.
Thus, Moi resumed the detentions without trial that Kenyatta had perfected under the Preservation of Public Security Act, a law inherited from the British colonial legal system. In 1982, a crackdown was undertaken at the University of Nairobi, that was considered a political hot-bed for lecturers who taught Marxist-Leninist political ideas.
According to the study, We Lived To Tell: The Nyayo House Story, conducted by German academic charity Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, after banning the Universities’ Academic Staff Association, Moi detained its leadership and other lecturers who included Willy Mutunga, Kamonji Wachira, Al Amin Mazrui, Edward Oyugi, Maina wa Kinyatti, Mukaru Ng’ang’a and Katama Mkangi.
Enemies in academia
Moi made it clear in the early days of his rule that dissent and independent political opinion and views would not be tolerated in a country he considered to be his own backyard. For Moi, an opportunity to stamp his authority presented itself on 2 August 1982, when a group of soldiers of the Kenya Air Force tried to overthrow his government.
Immediately after the suppression of the coup attempt, Moi had an excuse to deal with his real or perceived enemies in academia with a ruthlessness and boldness not yet witnessed in many other countries across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Wafula Buke, a former student leader at the Nairobi University, remembers how Kamiti maximum security prison and Nairobi remand prison were turned into concentration camps where university students, accused of supporting the rebel soldiers, were held.
“Among them was Titus Adungosi, the chairman of the student organisation of Nairobi University”, said Buke. Adungosi, who was just 22, was taken to court and found guilty for demonstrating and addressing other students in support of air force rebels. He was jailed for 10 years but mysteriously died in prison in 1988.
Between 1982 and the advent of calls for multi-party politics in 1990, Moi had vacuumed up dissent from Kenya’s academia. Among some of the prominent academics who fled Moi’s vacuum cleaner were Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Micere Mugo, Kimani Gecau, Anyang Nyong’o, Shadrack Gutto, Ngugi wa Mirii and Elisha Atieno Odhiambo. In effect, departments of literature, government, sociology and history at the University of Nairobi lost some of their finest scholars and have not recovered since.
A lover of higher education – in public
In public Moi, however, was a leader who loved higher education. Occasionally he would drive with his security detail unannounced to the student halls of residence and have tea with students. He would be televised telling the students to read, but to avoid foreign ideologies that had no meaning or value in African culture.
What Moi appeared to like most was the annual university graduation ceremonies when he would appear to confer degrees and diplomas to students. He would be dressed in feathered headgear and a multi-coloured academic gown reminiscent of the coloured military uniforms worn by Mobutu Sese Seko, the late president of the former Zaire.
As Moi presided over those occasions, he was not only recognised by his appointed vice-chancellors as “his excellency, the president of the Republic of Kenya”, but also as “the chancellor of all the public universities and teacher number one”.
No doubt this was one of the highs in the life of a man who never had a secondary-level education and, had fate not smiled on him, might have taught and retired as a headmaster in Sacho village where he was born and where he once grazed goats in the nearby Tugen Hills. While six public universities awarded him honorary doctoral degrees in law, literature and humanities, Moi never used those titles.
In his book, The Making of an African Statesman, Moi’s biographer Andrew Morton described him as a man in hurry as he impelled the contractor to finish construction of Moi University, his pet project. What Morton did not tell his readers was that Moi was impatient to have a major vocationally-oriented university in the country that would serve as a checkmate to the University of Nairobi that he believed was a hot-bed of dangerous, foreign political ideologies.
Like others among Africa’s ‘big men’, Moi supported the emergence of developmental universities, with curricula organised around learning that could produce ready-to-work graduates but had nothing to do with politics.
According to Professor Henry Mwanzi, a historian at Kenyatta University and one of Moi’s few handymen intellectuals, the president was a pragmatic realist and a master of practical politics.
“President Moi was not consumed by ideological strife and did not pursue theories for their own sake,” Mwanzi said of Moi in a reader, Which Way Africa?, edited by Lee Njiru, Moi’s press secretary for over 40 years.
In his memoir Trails in Academic and Administrative Leadership in Kenya, Professor Ratemo Michieka, the first vice-chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (1994-2013), tells how he was unexpectedly summoned to State House in Nakuru, about 165 kilometres from Nairobi, to meet the president to justify why Jomo Kenyatta University College of Agriculture and Technology, of which he was the principal, had made a request for university status.
“On arrival I was bluntly asked to explain why we wanted to disassociate from Kenyatta University,” said Michieka.
Michieka and his team had expected to find Moi in the company of the education minister, director of education, vice-chancellor of Kenyatta University (of which Jomo Kenyatta was a constituent college), and other higher education experts. But according to Michieka, the president was flanked by local politicians, some of them councillors.
“I and my team that included members of the Moi ethnic community slowly explained the developments we had achieved and [that we] now needed to be consolidated in an autonomous university,” wrote Michieka.
Behind a mask
In the week following that meeting, Michieka said he was surprised to hear in a news bulletin from the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, the official government mouthpiece, that his college had become a fully-fledged university. As Morton explained, in politics Moi remained behind a mask, as in most instances he expected others to show their hand before he revealed his cards.
However, in dealing with academia, the opposite was true. Moi was consistently hostile to scholars who dared to call for academic freedom, or supported multi-party democracy.
On 12 February, the man known as ‘professor of politics’ by many Kenyans will be interred at his home in Nakuru near the private, Christian-based Kabarak University where Arap Moi was also chancellor. There will be a huge headstone for a primary school headmaster who rose to become a president and left an indelible mark on Kenya’s university system.
YORUMLAR